Published: March 29, 1992

SWARTHMORE, Pa.—
Instead of tanning on beaches and playing volleyball, seven students from Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges spent their spring break visiting Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong.

The all-expense-paid trip was this year's Peace Studies mission, a program that "enables students to do an in-depth study of an area of the world where there are tensions and then gain first-hand experience there," said one of the two professors who made the trip, Jen Wu, who is an associate dean and lecturer in human development at Bryn Mawr College.

Each institution paid its students' expenses, said Varney Truscott, the assistant to the president at Bryn Mawr and coordinator of the Peace Studies trip.

Ms. Wu said the group met with government and charity leaders in Hong Kong, and visited two camps: Shek Kong, a detention center holding 7,000 to 10,000 Vietnamese who sought asylum elsewhere, and Lo Wu, a transit center holding 500 people who had agreed to return to Vietnam after being denied refugee status.

Quoc Trang, a junior political-science major at Swarthmore, said meeting the Vietnamese asylum-seekers in Hong Kong was a moving experience, especially for himself and the other three Vietnamese-American students. "I talked to a lot of children when I was walking around the camps, and I felt that I was looking at myself, except I was lucky enough to be accepted for asylum," he said. 'Surrounded by Barbed Wire'

Lan Van, a Bryn Mawr senior and biology major from Philadelphia, said she spoke with a young boy in a camp. "When I was leaving, he asked me, 'So where are you going now?' I told him that I was going home. I thought to myself, what do they call home?"

Ms. Van said she had hoped to visit the two refugee camps in Hong Kong where she had lived 12 years before, but one was closed, and the other was not open to the public.

She added that when she had arrived in Hong Kong, all Vietnamese were considered refugees and lived in open camps without fences. But now asylum-seekers must live "surrounded by barbed wire, as though they were in a cage," while waiting to hear if they have been granted refugee status, she said.

Mrs. Truscott said a panel of deans and faculty members selected the seven Peace Studies' group participants from a large applicant pool after reading their 2,000-word essays, resumes and letters of recommendation. She said that Hong Kong was selected for this year's Peace Studies because "Hong Kong is among the many places in the world that are confronted with refugee emergencies and because a Bryn Mawr alum had connections there."

In past years, she said, the Peace Studies' mission has gone to Eastern Europe, South Africa and cities in the United States. While Bryn Mawr and Haverford have held joint Peace Studies' trips since 1983, she said, this year is the first time that Swarthmore has participated. Weekly Seminars

Group members prepared for the trip, which was made over spring break from March 5 through March 15, by reading from an extensive list and attending weekly seminars for background on the "political, economic and social issues pertaining to the trip."

She also said that trip participants would speak at discussion panels at Haverford, Bryn Mawr and Swarthmore.

Mr. Trang said he was concerned about "whether the Vietnamese people in Hong Kong are educated about the screening procedure and whether the continuing American trade embargo is exacerbating the refugee situation."

"I want to educate people that America is still waging a psychological war against Vietnam, as long as it continues to have a trade embargo, which hurts the Vietnamese people and causes the refugee crisis to worsen," he said.

Annie Wright, a political science senior at Bryn Mawr from Washington, said that she hoped the discussion forums would cause students to question "why Vietnamese refugees who face death from persecution are granted asylum but those facing death from famine are not."